The Orwell Prize

1998 Journalism prize winner

Journalism prize winner

Polly Toynbee

Columnist, The Guardian

Won for journalism published by The Independent. Polly Toynbee is a political and social commentator for The Guardian. She was the Social Affairs Editor at the BBC, and has worked for The Observer, The Independent and The Washington Monthly. Her books include: A Working Life, a study of unskilled work; Hospital, a study of the NHS; Lost Children: Story of Adopted Children Searching for Their Mothers; and, more recently, Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain. Together with David Walker she has written Did Things Get Better?: An Audit of Labour’s Successes and Failures,Better or Worse?: Has Labour Delivered?, Unjust Rewards and The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? As well as the Orwell Prize, she has won Columnist of the Year at the National Press Awards and the Political Studies Association’s Political Journalist of the Year award. She is president of the Social Policy Association, and Chair of the Brighton and Hove Arts Festival. She is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and sits on the board of the Political Quarterly. She has four children and lives in Lambeth.